The first stage of my return journey took me to the Advanced Dressing Station at Henin. My servant went with me, carrying my haversack. He was a quiet clumsy middle-aged man who always did his best and never complained. While we picked our way along the broken ground of Henin Hill I continued talkative, halting now and again to recover breath and take a last stare at the blighted slope where yesterday I had stumbled to and fro with my working party.
The sky was now overcast and the landscape grey and derelict. The activities of the attack had subsided, and we seemed to be walking in a waste land where dead men had been left out in the rain after being killed for no apparent purpose. Here and there, figures could be seen moving towards the Dressing Station, some of them carrying stretchers.
It was the mid-day stagnation which usually followed an early morning attack. The Dressing Station was a small underground place crowded with groaning wounded. Two doctors were doing what they could for men who had paid a heavy price for their freedom. My egocentricity diminished among all that agony. I remember listening to an emotional padre who was painfully aware that he could do nothing except stand about and feel sympathetic. The consolations of the Church of England weren’t much in demand at an Advance Dressing Station. I was there myself merely to go through the formality of being labelled ‘walking wounded’. I was told to go on to a place called ‘B. Echelon’, which meant another three miles of muddy walking. Beat to the world, I reached B. Echelon, and found our Quartermaster in a tent with several officers newly arrived from the Base and one or two back from leave. Stimulated by a few gulps of whisky and water, I renewed my volubility and talked nineteen to the dozen until the kind Quartermaster put me into the mess-cart which carried me to a cross road where I waited for a motor bus. There, after a long wait, I shook hands with my servant, and the handshake seemed to epitomize my good-bye to the Second Battalion. I thanked him for looking after me so well; but one couldn’t wish a man luck when he was going back to the Hindenburg Trench. It may be objected that my attitude toward the Western Front was too intimate; but this was a question of two human beings, one of whom was getting out of it comfortably while the other went back to take his chance in the world’s worst war…. In the bus, wedged among ‘walking wounded’, I was aware that I had talked quite enough. For an hour and a half we bumped and swayed along ruined roads till we came to the Casualty Clearing Station at Warlencourt. It was seven o’clock and all I got that night was a cup of Bovril and an anti-tetanus injection.
The place was overcrowded with bad cases and I had to wait until after midnight for a bed. I remember sitting in a chair listening to the rain pelting on the roof of the tent and the wailing of a wintry wind. I was too exhausted to sleep; my head had lost control of its thoughts, which continued to re-echo my good-bye garrulities; the injection had made me feel chilly and queer, and my wound began to be painful. But I was able to feel sorry for ‘the poor old Battalion’ (which was being relieved that night) and to be thankful for my own lucky escape.
What I’d been through was nothing compared with the sort of thing that many soldiers endured over and over again; nevertheless I condoled with myself on having had no end of a bad time.
Next afternoon a train (with 500 men and 35 officers on board) conveyed me to a Base Hospital. My memories of that train are strange and rather terrible, for it carried a cargo of men in whose minds the horrors they had escaped from were still vitalized and violent. Many of us still had the caked mud of the war zone on our boots and clothes, and every bandaged man was accompanied by his battle experience. Although many of them talked lightly and even facetiously about it, there was an aggregation of enormities in the atmosphere of that train. I overheard some slightly wounded officers who were excitedly remembering their adventures up at Wancourt, where they’d been bombed out of a trench in the dark. Their jargoning voices mingled with the rumble and throb of the train as it journeyed – so safely and sedately – through the environing gloom. The Front Line was behind us; but it could lay its hand on our hearts, though its bludgeoning reality diminished with every mile. It was as if we were pursued by the Arras Battle which had now become a huge and horrible idea. We might be boastful or sagely reconstructive about our experience, in accordance with our different characters. But our minds were still out of breath and our inmost thoughts in disorderly retreat from bellowing darkness and men dying out in shell-holes under the desolation of returning daylight. We were the survivors; few among us would ever tell the truth to our friends and relations in England. We were carrying something in our heads which belonged to us alone, and to those we had left behind us in the battle. There were dying men, too, on board that Red Cross train, men dying for their country in comparative comfort.
We reached our destination after midnight, and the next day I was able to write in my diary: ‘I am still feeling warlike and quite prepared to go back to the Battalion in a few weeks; I am told that my wound will be healed in a fortnight. The doctor here says I am a lucky man as the bullet missed my jugular vein and spine by a fraction of an inch. I know it would be better for me not to go back to England, where I should probably be landed for at least three months and then have all the hell of returning again in July or August.’ But in spite of my self-defensive scribble I was in London on Friday evening, and by no means sorry to be carried through the crowd of patriotic spectators at Charing Cross Station. My stretcher was popped into an ambulance which took me to a big hospital at Denmark Hill. At Charing Cross a woman handed me a bunch of flowers and a leaflet by the Bishop of London who earnestly advised me to lead a clean life and attend Holy Communion.
PART NINE
HOSPITAL AND CONVALESCENCE
1
The first few days were like lying in a boat. Drifting, drifting, I watched the high sunlit windows or the firelight that flickered and glowed on the ceiling when the ward was falling asleep. Outside the hospital a late spring was invading the home-service world. Trees were misty green and sometimes I could hear a blackbird singing. Even the screech and rumble of electric trams was a friendly sound; trams meant safety; the troops in the trenches thought about trams with affection. With an exquisite sense of languor and release I lifted my hand to touch the narcissi by my bed. They were symbols of an immaculate spirit – creatures whose faces knew nothing of War’s demented language.
For a week, perhaps, I could dream that for me the War was over, because I’d got a neat hole through me and the nurse with her spongings forbade me to have a bath. But I soon emerged from my mental immunity; I began to think; and my thoughts warned me that my second time out in France had altered my outlook (if such a confused condition of mind could be called an outlook). I began to feel that it was my privilege to be bitter about my war experiences; and my attitude toward civilians implied that they couldn’t understand and that it was no earthly use trying to explain things to them. Visitors were, of course, benevolent and respectful; my wound was adequate evidence that I’d ‘been in the thick of it’, and I allowed myself to hint at heroism and its attendant horrors. But as might have been expected my behaviour varied with my various visitors; or rather it would have done so had my visitors been more various. My inconsistencies might become tedious if tabulated collectively, so I will confine myself to the following imaginary instances.
Some Senior Officer under whom I’d served: Modest, politely subordinate, strongly imbued with the ‘spirit of the Regiment’ and quite ready to go out again. ‘Awfully nice of you to come and see me, sir.’ Feeling that I ought to jump out of bed and salute, and that it would be appropriate and pleasant to introduce him to ‘some of my people’ (preferably of impeccable social status). Willingness to discuss active service technicalities and revive memories of shared front-line experience.
Middle-aged or elderly Male Civilian: Tendency (in response to sympathetic gratitude for services rendered to King and Country) to assume haggard facial aspect of one who had ‘been through hell’. Inclination to wish that my wound was a bit wors
e than it actually was, and have nurses hovering round with discreet reminders that my strength mustn’t be overtaxed. Inability to reveal anything crudely horrifying to civilian sensibilities. ‘Oh yes, I’ll be out there again by the autumn.’ (Grimly wan reply to suggestions that I was now honourably qualified for a home-service job.) Secret antagonism to all uncomplimentary references to the German Army.
Charming Sister of Brother Officer: Jocular, talkative, debonair, and diffidently heroic. Wishful to be wearing all possible medal-ribbons on pyjama jacket. Able to furnish a bright account of her brother (if still at the front) and suppressing all unpalatable facts about the War. ‘Jolly decent of you to blow in and see me.’
Hunting Friend (a few years above Military Service Age): Deprecatory about sufferings endured at the front. Tersely desirous of hearing all about last season’s sport. ‘By Jingo, that must have been a nailing good gallop!’ Jokes about the Germans, as if throwing bombs at them was a tolerable substitute for fox-hunting. A good deal of guffawing (mitigated by remembrance that I’d got a bullet hole through my lung). Optimistic anticipations of next season’s Opening Meet and an early termination of hostilities on all fronts.
Nevertheless my supposed reactions to any one of these hypothetical visitors could only be temporary. When alone with my fellow patients I was mainly disposed toward self-pitying estrangement from everyone except the troops in the Front Line. (Casualties didn’t count as tragic unless dead or badly maimed.)
When Aunt Evelyn came up to London to see me I felt properly touched by her reticent emotion; embitterment against civilians couldn’t be applied to her. But after she had gone I resented her gentle assumption that I had done enough and could now accept a safe job. I wasn’t going to be messed about like that, I told myself. Yet I knew that the War was unescapable. Sooner or later I should be sent back to the Front Line, which was the only place where I could be any use. A cushy wound wasn’t enough to keep me out of it.
I couldn’t be free from the War; even this hospital ward was full of it, and every day the oppression increased. Outwardly it was a pleasant place to be lazy in. Morning sunshine slanted through the tall windows, brightening the grey-green walls and the forty beds. Daffodils and tulips made spots of colour under three red-draped lamps which hung from the ceiling. Some officers lay humped in bed, smoking and reading newspapers; others loafed about in dressing-gowns, going to and from the washing room where they scraped the bristles from their contented faces. A raucous gramophone continually ground out popular tunes. In the morning it was rag-time – Everybody’s Doing it and At the Fox-Trot Ball. (Somewhere a Voice is calling, God send you back to me, and such-like sentimental songs were reserved for the evening hours.) Before midday no one had enough energy to begin talking war shop, but after that I could always hear scraps of conversation from around the two fireplaces. My eyes were reading one of Lamb’s Essays, but my mind was continually distracted by such phrases as ‘Barrage lifted at the first objective’, ‘shelled us with heavy stuff’, ‘couldn’t raise enough decent N.C.O.s’, ‘first wave got held up by machine-guns’, and ‘bombed them out of a sap’.
There were no serious cases in the ward, only flesh wounds and sick. These were the lucky ones, already washed clean of squalor and misery and strain. They were lifting their faces to the sunlight, warming their legs by the fire; but there wasn’t much to talk about except the War.
In the evenings they played cards at a table opposite my bed; the blinds were drawn, the electric light was on, and a huge fire glowed on walls and ceiling. Glancing irritably up from my book I criticized the faces of the card-players and those who stood watching the game. There was a lean airman in a grey dressing-gown, his narrow whimsical face puffing a cigarette below a turban-like bandage; he’d been brought down by the Germans behind Arras and had spent three days in a bombarded dug-out with Prussians, until our men drove them back and rescued him. The Prussians hadn’t treated him badly, he said. His partner was a swarthy Canadian with a low beetling forehead, sneering wideset eyes, fleshy cheeks, and a loose heavy mouth. I couldn’t like that man, especially when he was boasting how he ‘did in some prisoners’. Along the ward they were still talking about ‘counter-attacked from the redoubt’, ‘permanent rank of captain’, ‘never drew any allowances for six weeks’, ‘failed to get through their wire’…. I was beginning to feel the need for escape from such reminders. My brain was screwed up tight, and when people came to see me I answered their questions excitedly and said things I hadn’t intended to say.
From the munition factory across the road, machinery throbbed and droned and crashed like the treading of giants; the noise got on my nerves. I was being worried by bad dreams. More than once I wasn’t sure whether I was awake or asleep; the ward was half shadow and half sinking firelight, and the beds were quiet with huddled sleepers. Shapes of mutilated soldiers came crawling across the floor; the floor seemed to be littered with fragments of mangled flesh. Faces glared upward; hands clutched at neck or belly; a livid grinning face with bristly moustache peered at me above the edge of my bed; his hands clawed at the sheets. Some were like the dummy figures used to deceive snipers; others were alive and looked at me reproachfully, as though envying me the warm safety of life which they’d longed for when they shivered in the gloomy dawn, waiting for the whistles to blow and the bombardment to lift…. A young English private in battle equipment pulled himself painfully toward me and fumbled in his tunic for a letter; as he reached forward to give it to me his head lolled sideways and he collapsed; there was a hole in his jaw and the blood spread across his white face like ink spilt on blotting paper….
Violently awake, I saw the ward without its phantoms. The sleepers were snoring and a nurse in grey and scarlet was coming silently along to make up the fire.
2
Although I have stated that after my first few days in hospital I ‘began to think’, I cannot claim that my thoughts were clear or consistent. I did, however, become definitely critical and inquiring about the War. While feeling that my infantry experience justified this, it did not occur to me that I was by no means fully informed on the subject. In fact I generalized intuitively, and was not unlike a young man who suddenly loses his belief in religion and stands up to tell the Universal Being that He doesn’t exist, adding that if He does, He treats the world very unjustly. I shall have more to say later on about my antagonism to the World War; in the meantime it queered my criticisms of it by continually reminding me that the Adjutant had written to tell me that my name had been ‘sent in for another decoration’. I could find no fault with this hopeful notion, and when I was allowed out of hospital for the first time my vanity did not forget how nice its tunic would look with one of those (still uncommon) little silver rosettes on the M.C. ribbon, which signified a Bar; or, better still, a red and blue D.S.O.
It was May 2nd and warm weather; no one appeared to be annoyed about the War, so why should I worry? Sitting on the top of a bus, I glanced at the editorial paragraphs of the Unconservative Weekly. The omniscience of this ably written journal had become the basis of my provocative views on world affairs. I agreed with every word in it and was thus comfortably enabled to disagree with the bellicose patriotism of the Morning Post. The only trouble was that an article in the Unconservative Weekly was for me a sort of divine revelation. It told me what I’d never known but now needed to believe, and its ratiocinations and political pronouncements passed out of my head as quickly as they entered it. While I read I concurred; but if I’d been asked to restate the arguments I should have contented myself with saying ‘It’s what I’ve always felt myself, though I couldn’t exactly put it into words.’
The Archbishop of Canterbury was easier to deal with. Smiling sardonically, I imbibed his ‘Message to the Nation about the War and the Gospel’. ‘Occasions may arise’, he wrote, ‘when exceptional obligations are laid upon us. Such an emergency having now arisen, the security of the nation’s food supply may largely depend upon the labour
which can be devoted to the land. This being so, we are, I think, following the guidance given in the Gospel if in such a case we make a temporary departure from our rule. I have no hesitation in saying that in the need which these weeks present, men and women may with a clear conscience do field-work on Sundays.’ Remembering the intense bombardment in front of Arras on Easter Sunday, I wondered whether the Archbishop had given the sanction of the Gospel for that little bit of Sabbath field-work. Unconscious that he was, presumably, pained by the War and its barbarities, I glared morosely in the direction of Lambeth Palace and muttered, ‘Silly old fossil!’ Soon afterwards I got off the bus at Piccadilly Circus and went into the restaurant where I had arranged to meet Julian Durley.
With Durley I reverted automatically to my active-service self. The war which we discussed was restricted to the doings of the Flintshire Fusiliers. Old So-and-so had been wounded; poor old Somebody had been killed in the Bullecourt show; old Somebody Else was still commanding B Company. Old jokes and grotesquely amusing trench incidents were re-enacted. The Western Front was the same treacherous blundering tragi-comedy which the mentality of the Army had agreed to regard as something between a crude bit of fun and an excuse for a good grumble. I suppose that the truth of the matter was that we were remaining loyal to the realities of our war experience, keeping our separate psychological secrets to ourselves, and avoiding what Durley called ‘his dangerous tendency to become serious’. His face, however, retained the haunted unhappy look which it had acquired since the Delville Wood attack last autumn, and his speaking voice was still a hoarse whisper.
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer Page 20
